


Lessons Learned from Starlight

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess [4]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: But Morse finds he’s all right after all, M/M, Thoughts of Suicide, more melancholy than I intended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 20:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17210771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: Endeavour takes a northbound train and wonders what he should do next.Missing scene from As A Circling Bird.





	Lessons Learned from Starlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gwendolynflight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendolynflight/gifts), [Kmrjo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kmrjo/gifts), [snickersnack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snickersnack/gifts).



> These are also meant as gifts for Little Lamb, but I didn't see your name in the suggestion box. 
> 
> Ummm . . . This came out a bit darker than I thought it would have . . . so I wrote a short companion piece to balance this out! 
> 
> And a big thank you again to Kmrjo for the new icon! :o)

 

His first thought was to return to Oxford. It seemed as if his life was destined to revolve around that city. The shadowed steeples and domes, dark against a purpling sky, were at least familiar, and he had made new starts there twice over now—once as a student and once as a policeman. Perhaps he could do it again?

But then, he could not bear the thought of running into any of _them_. It seemed they had all told him that he was making a mistake—everyone he knew, if not the first time he left for France, then the second.

All he could see was Tony’s face, tight with disapproval, Kay sadly shaking her head.

And then this morning, the Thursdays hadn’t seemed to want him to go—Mrs. Thursday’s eyes had been bright with concern, Thursday’s narrow and assessing —it was as if they knew all along something like this would happen.

And it did.

But every instinct he had was set on flight, to get home as soon as possible—to rush up the walk of the house in Lorraine, push Bix across the threshold, and slam the door behind them.

His instincts never seemed to serve him well.

 

Perhaps he should consider whatever it was he had been planning to do and then do just do the opposite.

He had been planning on going south. Now, he would go north. It wasn’t much of a plan.

 

But, for now, it was all he had to be getting on with.

 

The exchange rate, it transpires, is terrible. Three francs was certainly not worth much. It was almost not worth the terror of going into that bank, with all of those people and the queues and the odd look from the teller and the glower of the uniformed guard in the lobby. When Endeavour steps out, back into the freedom of the street, he has to take a few deep breaths to steady himself; his heart feels as if it’s racing.

He puts a hand to his forehead to try to stop the world from spinning and finds that he does have one bit of luck: he had forgotten that he had asked Bix for his sunglasses when they were in the car, and that they are still perched on top of his head, tangled in his hair. He works to get them free and then sets them on his face.

 

He looks down at the change in his hand.  It’s already time for his second crucial decision.

Again, the road ahead is dividing and dividing and it’s enough to make a person throw his hands in the air and give up. It seems some people find a road and stay on it. Why can’t he be one of those people? One who makes his own life, rather than one who allows life to make him?

He begins walking north. As he goes, he scans the sidewalks for coins that might have fallen to the ground and checks the slots of call boxes for forgotten change. In the end, he has enough money to buy two things: a cheap pen at a stationary store and a cheap beer in a pub.

  
The beer is terrible stuff—by rights it ought not to be called beer, really—but it allows him do something without guilt. He chose this place because it serves fish and chips. The smell of it all makes him nauseous, but, just as he thought, there’s a dispensary with paper napkins on the table. He pulls out two large handfuls and stuffs them in his pockets. He’s already stolen a bag, a police car, an Italian designer jacket, and a pair of sunglasses. The list just goes on and on.

He has no idea how he’s fallen so low. He wishes Bixby could have just left him alone out at that lake house. Then he could have been resting quietly now, half-buried in leaves, and not sitting in a greasy booth, wondering how a policeman becomes a thief.  

 

He’s walking north and the landscape changes—buildings are replaced by trees, and clouds fly across blue skies as if they are rolling right over him, and the sun sets, and he sleeps and wakes in fields of tall grasses tumbled with rings of rocks and stones. And then he’s walking again, until he comes to an ocean of purple flowers, each blossom hung like a bell, each sounding its own note, until the noise is as loud as the crashing of waves. And as he strides through waves of purple, birds circle above him, crying out, what I do is me, for this I came.

It’s enough to make you laugh, to realize how sure birds are about the rightness of their decisions.

 

He writes the world on the napkins. It’s not the same as having a notebook. What he really wishes is that could be in his study in Lorraine with his typewriter that knows how to sing and clack clack-click, and if only he had just been able to keep his eyes on the wheels of that suitcase and not looked at all of the lights.

Lights can guide and lights can deceive. There are too many lights at airports. It’s amazing to Endeavour that people can get on the right planes. But they all do it. They do it all the time, like it’s nothing.

 How do they do it?

 

Walking does not get him far. What happens to people if they are caught on a train with no ticket? Surely, they don’t go to prison, do they?

 

If they try to ask him for his ticket, he’ll run, he’ll jump out of the train somehow, even if he has to open an emergency door or scramble out of the window and . . .

 

. . . . And he’s on the train. Trains travel very rationally—they stay on the tracks. Birds stay on their tracks too, even though they circle.

Everyone on the train seems to know when it’s their stop, where they should get off. The man sitting next to him is in such a rush to get to the door, he leaves half a sandwich sitting on the table. It’s his stop, and he just gets up and leaves it there. Can you imagine?

Endeavour waits until it seems no one is watching and then takes it. He’s tempted to devour it in three bites, but that might look odd.  So he eats it slowly, casually, as if he has a right to the thing, looking out of the window and into the sun-glass-tinted, dimmed worlds that fly past him: worlds of farmhouses and rivers and sheep.  

As an elderly couple gets off the train, they leave a five-pound note on his table. They thunk it down before him rather too loudly; it makes Endeavour jump, that sudden movement.

Endeavour realizes: They think he’s blind because he’s wearing sunglasses on a darkly overcast day. He opens his mouth to speak, to let them know their mistake. But no words come out.

And anyway, they must be right. Maybe in all the important ways, he _is_ blind. Although sometimes, he feels he sees the same things that everyone else does; he simply sees them in all the wrong ways.  

 

But that’s even more lonely.

 

What he ought to do is try to sell that jacket. It’s the only thing he’s got that’s worth anything. But then, if he doesn’t have anything to remember Bixby by, won’t he start forgetting him, the way he forgets everything else?

 

He wishes he could remember what happened that day at the airport.

 

He knows he wanted nothing more than to get back to that house, to close the door and never leave it again. That whole episode at Maplewick Hall proved to him it was all too true, what he had feared: the world was a dangerous and unpredictable place, and even something as innocent and sparkling with light as a glass of lemonade carried the threat of madness within it.

Endeavour was finished with it. He wanted to stay in that house with his records and typewriter and never leave. If Bixby tried to let anyone in the place, he would go upstairs until they left. He knew it wasn’t right, but he couldn’t help it.

He would stay inside and watch the world at a safe distance through the glass, and Bix would look at him like that, as if his very existence made him feel sorry, somehow, and Bix had a face that was made for laughter.

It was better not to go. It was better to let him go.

 Whoever he was.

 

And it was a moot point, anyway. It was clear the man had finally lost all patience with him. “And you drank the stuff?” he had asked incredulously.  

But if only the man knew the dangers he saw everywhere, he might have understood. When you’re constantly overriding your instincts just to get through the day, how do you know when to trust them and when not to trust them? He doesn’t trust himself. He’s a danger to himself.

They were all right, all along. That’s what hurt the most.

I told Cyril that he should have you looked at, Gwen said, and Stop it stop it, have you gone mad? Susan said, and It’s not as if anyone normal would think to look there, Jakes said, and You’re not right, go home, Thursday said, and Are you mad? We’re in the middle of Heathrow International, not some provincial wedding at three in the morning . . .  

 

Pagan had the right idea in the first place. That would have been the perfect time to do it too, right when no one would have come looking for him. That was what had always stopped him when he was Morse, the sickening idea that it would be Joycie who found him. He wishes he could stop in Lincolnshire and see her, but he doesn’t know how to without seeing Gwen. So he stays on the traiin.

 

In Scotland there are deep, cold lakes, black under the sun, He likes the idea of finding one and walking into it; he could just disappear under the water. He rests his head against the window and closes his eyes, imagining being weightless in water, his hair turning to seaweed.

 

He opens his eyes and the light has changed. He must have fallen asleep. How much time has passed?

He’s stiff and aching. And he feels almost like it might be another day. But that’s not possible.

Is it?

 He’s pushing it. He’s been on this train too long. He had better go. But where? Then he remembers his dream of lying down in the water, closing his eyes and falling into a soft, floating world.

Too bad he had to spend all of those years as a policeman, too bad he knows that things bob up to the top, that all things come to the surface or wash up on shores one way or another.

 

And there are people now, who would notice if he disappeared entirely.

 No.

 He doesn't want to leave Bix entirely, leave Bix wondering what he should have done, wondering if he could have fixed things. He always seems to believe everything can be fixed.

Americans and their happy endings.

 

But maybe, if he just explained . . .  but no, there’s no more room on the napkins on which to write, “I’m so sorry. Please don’t make a fuss about it. I’m just so tired.”

And, anyway, the napkin would deteriorate in the water before he did.

And maybe all of these napkins should deteriorate. What rubbish this all is. He’ll never give this Turner. He’ll never call Turner again or write anything again. He’s sorry he took so many napkins from that pub now. He hadn’t even ordered any fish or chips.

He may as well just use these as napkins again.

Because, after all, what was the point of pretending?

What had he told the young constable with the dark fringe? That that those Beatles songs were written as if the lyricist was high on something? And that’s just why people listened to them.

But what did it seem that half of those people in the woods around Lake Silence were up to? The academe could give Endeavour all the awards and accolades it wanted, but none of that mattered now. It was clear that for many, his books were the perfect accompaniment for a drug-induced trip beyond some psychedelic door.  

The painful thing about it is this: when that sleepy-eyed fellow from the Beatles writes, he most likely _is_ flying high on something. When Endeavour writes, he isn’t. To him, it’s all as natural as breathing.

He’s a walking, breathing hallucinogenic episode.

It’s like being punched in the gut, the realization.

 

 He doesn’t like the way the train is moving, cutting straight, straight through fields filled with pensive looking sheep. It’s taking him further and further from where he wants to go. The next time the train stops, he gets off, and then he’s walking.

And the sky is leaving blue and turning to purple and to black, and he’s walking, and then the sky is black, he lies down in the grass and he’s Josephine and he falls asleep.

The next day, it’s the same. The sky is blue and purple and black. Brooks tumble past and he checks to see how the rainbow-colored fish are swimming before he trusts the cold water to drink, before he even washes his face with the stuff. Birds circle and cry, and it’s a forlorn sound, as if the birds suddenly aren’t so certain, after all; it’s a sound that makes him feel he’s forgetting something. Or someone.

And then, one night, the sky is black and he lies down, and instead of Josephine, he’s Endeavour; instead of going to sleep, he watches the stars.

 

 And there’s the Plough.

 And suddenly Endeavour realizes he had made a mistake.

Bixby was perfect: he always had every hair and every word in place; he had calm dark eyes that swept the room and measured and analyzed and considered.  Endeavour always felt just the opposite, like he was spilling out over the edges of things, like the room was sweeping out over him.

It must be wonderful to be like Bix, he thought.

It must be exhausting.

 

Would Bix be all right, now, that he was gone? How could he ever rest for a minute, spill out over the edges of his mask, without Endeavour around?

 

 “ _It_ _was_ _in_ _a_ _journal_ _I_ _read_.”

Suddenly, Endeavour is laughing at the memory. When did Bixby ever read any scientific journals? Why would scientists bother themselves about the names of constellations in the first place?  It was laughable, not at all up to his usual standard of glibness, that much was certain. It was almost as if part of him wanted to be caught.

Pagan’s retort had been right there, on the tip of his tongue. But it seemed too unkind, to catch him out like that, just because he had forgotten his lines, just because the actor behind Bixby had to take a coffee break.

“The stars in that constellation are moving further apart in that part of the universe,” Endeavour says to the sky, in a polished Bixby voice.

And then he’s laughing.  And the sound of his laughter is the only sound amidst the stars. He’s alone in the dark and laughing at the memory of stars, and of the lights in Bixby’s grateful dark eyes.  But it’s all right.

Because now he knows: All along, he’s been waiting for Bixby to fix everything.

But all along it’s been he, Endeavour, who was supposed to fix things.

And he can fix it. He can fix everything.

If only Bix will let him try.

He wonders if Bixby is at home in Lorraine. Or maybe he’s gone out to a party, and he’s holding a glass of Scotch, and the lights of the crystal chandeliers above are moving like the stars in his eyes. Maybe he’s laughing. Or maybe he’s in his study, on the phone, or maybe he’s asleep in their room, the robin’s-egg blue walls turned sky-dark, and Endeavour wishes he was there. 

He takes the jacket out of his bag and bunches it up as a pillow, and it still smells of aftershave, and Endeavour closes his eyes.

“Good night, Bix,” he says into the darkness. And he’s Josephine and he falls right to sleep.

 

In the morning, Endeavour sits up, tucks his hair behind his ears and brushes bits of dried grass off of his clothes.

Well.  He’ll just have to try, that’s all.

He walks until he finds a red call box; it’s almost surreal, the way it’s sitting there along the road.

When he steps inside, he lifts the receiver, and he realizes with a jolt that it’s been a long time since he said any words to anyone.

“Hello, Operator? I’d like to make a collect, long-distance call, please,” he says.

My, how precise, he thinks.  He hadn’t thought he’d be able to say it.

“What’s the number, please?” crackles an official sounding voice.

Endeavour closes his eyes, lets the image of the numbers float before him.  “Country code, 33. 1 58 32 37 94.”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Endeavour Morse.”

There. That was fine.

“One moment, please.”

He hears the click, a different ring tone, a murmur of words, and then another click and another tone. “Von Haussen Dubret,” says another official-sounding voice.

 “Bonjour. C’est Endeavour Morse. Pourrais-je parler a Matthew Turner?  

The man laughs, uncertainly. “Vous plaiantez?”

 _Is_ _he_ _kidding_? What does the man mean? Endeavour hesitates. “Non,” he says simply.

Then, there’s a sound of an intake of breath. Then there is a sudden click.

Endeavour is about to give up, about to hang the receiver up, when he hears shouting through the ear piece.

“Endeavour? Where the hell are you?”

“I’m at a call box,” Endeavour says.

“Where?” Turner shouts.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know?’”

There’s a barrage of cursing and yelling, and Endeavour holds the receiver away, holding it out so that the words drift off into the wind. Amidst the words, he can hear, “Lake Silence” and “scattered” and “the fourteenth.”

“And now you’re telling me you don’t know where you are? Why are you doing this shit? I have enough troubles to be getting on with.  You were the one person who was easy to work with. If you are going to turn into one of these French prima donnas, then I might as well . . . wait . . . you sound different. You aren’t on drugs, are you?”

“No, not really.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Another barrage of cursing fills the air… Endeavour holds the receiver up to the clouds.

“Endeavour? Endeavour?”

He puts the receiver back to his face. “Yes.”

“Find out where the hell you are and call me back. I’ll drive out.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not in France.”

“What?”

“I think I am in  . . . I think I might be in Scotland,” he can barely manage this last. What an absolutely barmy sentence. “ _I_ _think_ _I_ _might_ _be_ _in_ _Scotland_?”

He can feel a new burst of fuming bursting to explode through the wires, but then it cuts off; perhaps something in his voice has altered Turner’s mood. As if he understands that he didn’t mean any of this to happen. It all just sort of did. One car hit another and then another and the next thing you know is everything is in a smoldering heap and you don’t know which way is up.

“Well, find out where you are and call me back then, all right?”

“All right,” Endeavour says.

Endeavour hangs up the phone and starts walking again. And the path divides and divides. He has absolutely no intention of ever calling Turner back. He hadn’t expected him to be so angry.

But the next time he stumbles upon a town, he walks toward it, instead of away.

He finds another call box, and calls Turner back.

“I am in Scotland,” Endeavour says. “In a town called Wick.”

********

Turner wires some money to the bank under his name. Another bank, another queue. There’s no guard here; it’s just a small local branch, not a central London bank.

The first thing he does is go to buy some new clothes. He’s been wearing the same things for. . . well, for as long as he’s been wearing them. He goes into a shop, and the young woman looks alarmed at the sight of him.

“All my luggage was lost,” he explains, with an apologetic smile. Once he speaks, he must seem quiet enough or sane enough that she seems reassured. He catches a look at himself in the mirror and almost doesn’t recognize himself. He’s not Pagan nor Morse nor Endeavour, he’s just a space between the songs.

But wait. He had decided. He was finished with that. He was Endeavour Morse and he really needed a shower and a shave.

He stops at the chemist to get some shaving things, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a notebook.  And there’s a rack of postcards. And then he can hear the words, as if they are rolling and tumbling from across the sea.

“You’ll send me a postcard, won’t you? Let me know how you’re getting on?

So, he buys a postcard, too.

Endeavour decides he quite likes Wick; the town has a distillery and tidy streets that all march down to the bay. Many of the houses in the older part of town open straight out onto the sidewalk; there are no front gardens at all. They all must be terribly brave, those who live there.

At the end of one street is a large house with a sign advertising rooms for rent. Endeavour steps up to the door and knocks.

The landlady who answers the door is one of those elderly women whose voices sound like cozy, rainy afternoons. Her front parlor is full of books and cats and tea cups, and she recognizes who is he is right away, and this time it’s a bit of luck that she does; the way he looks now, it might lead someone to think he was a bit mad.

“I was just having a bit of a wander,” Endeavour explains. “And I got lost.”

The landlady just smiles, as if that’s all perfectly natural, just something poets do, roam around without even a toothbrush, and Endeavour doesn’t bother to correct the notion.

Upstairs, he shaves and takes a shower and combs his hair out and puts on his new clothes. He risks a glance in the mirror on his way downstairs. And. Look. He’s doing all right actually.

At dinner, he eats until he realizes the landlady is staring at him. Then he slows down. Then, he realizes he’s sort of sick.

Turner shows up with an assistant the following afternoon. And it’s hell, but he knew it was coming, at least. He’s under their thumb now. He’s forced to make excuses and then promises and then pose for another miserable picture. He’ll have to endure it all. And Turner says, “Will you straighten yourself out, for God’s sakes?” He reaches out a hand to him, and Endeavour stumbles away. And then, “Well, I guess that’s all right. Just get that ink off your face, for God’s sakes.”

Endeavour feels as if he’s curling within himself.

******

But what to say on the postcard? How he’s getting on? Isn’t that what Bixby said?

He’s not sure if Bixby would approve of anything he’s been doing so far. Wearing the same clothes day after day, forgetting that he hasn’t eaten and then eating anything in sight: these are all things that rank fairly high on the list of things that annoy the hell out of him. So. Maybe the less said the better.

He doesn’t have lots of news to share. Just that he’s talked to Turner and has been given an extension to finish his book.

All he’s going to be doing is writing. So. He’ll write Bix a poem. Not like the ones in his book. He’ll write a simple one. Just classic and straightforward, not spilling out all over the edges.

 

Postcards aren’t very large, so he can fit only the first few lines on the thing, but that’s what Bixby had said to do. He’ll have to add the rest on another postcard later.

******

Before Turner leaves for the train station, Endeavour gives him the few pages he had written the night before, after the torture of the photo shoot. Turner seems to cheer up. 

“I like it,” he says.

Maybe it was a good idea Endeavour had, going to another place, keeping things “fresh.” Whatever that means. Can poems go stale? Actually, he supposes, they can. That was what was wrong with those poems on the napkins. They were all stale.

And then, suddenly, that very afternoon, Turner calls again, right from London, and wires him more money. Suddenly, Turner seems to think it was a terrific idea what he had done, turning his poems loose in the woods. “I called Foucault in marketing, told him—what are we paying you people for If our writers have to do their own promotional work? My God, that was brilliant! It’s become like a goddamned Easter Egg hunt out there!”

Endeavour has no idea what Turner is talking about. But he seems happy. Maybe, since he’s been so compliant, already having turned a few things in, posing for that ridiculous photo, he can ask a favor or two.

Because the question is: will Bixby read his postcards?  He only takes the time to read things that pertain to him directly. And right now, Endeavour very much doubts that he pertains to him directly.

But a photo, bright words on a book in a window—he might have no choice but to see that.

 

 “Where in Oxfordshire? As a Circling Bird? That’s not even a line in the book.” Turner grumbles.

Endeavour is about to give up on the idea, when there’s a pause on the other end of the line. “All right, then,” Turner says. “I’m not particularly opposed to that.”

*******

There’s an envelope for him in the post. It’s from Bix. Endeavour takes it outside on the back steps to open it—there doesn’t seem to be enough air inside.  His hands are shaking so badly he can scarcely open the thing.

 

Inside is his passport and the wad of francs he had hidden under his mattress. For a moment, he thinks Bixby is telling him to come home—after all, here they are, his passport and airfare.

 

But then, the fact that the money is that bundle he had hidden seems to say something else. No. It’s not an invitation. It’s a dismissal.

Here are your things.

Somehow, Endeavour finds that he’s sitting down on the steps. And of course he doesn’t want him back. Doesn’t he remember? And there was the shove, and the flash of dark eyes, and the “are you mad?”

Endeavour crosses his arms over his knees and rests his forehead on them.

 

And Pagan said, “Go to hell,” and “I don’t need a warden.” But Bixby was a freight train. He acted as if he simply could not envision a world in which things did not go his way.

Bixby was just like the stars that can’t help but send out their light. Light that must have left years and even centuries ago, but it keeps radiating out, out into empty space, sparkling in dark eyes. It just doesn’t stop. There’s no way to stop it, the light. Once it’s left its source, it speeds through the universe, faster than all things visible.

And Endeavour puts the sunglasses down over his face, and he’s Bixby.

 

And he goes upstairs and writes another postcard.

He sends one postcard. And then another. And he goes out walking, and the moors are lonely and the birds circle overhead and cry out. Sometimes, he finds himself walking along the coast. And he steps out onto the rocks that are half-hidden in water, where the seals lie flat on their stomachs, watching him. They stay in groups, eyeing him grumpily; they aren’t the friendliest of sorts. But the seabirds with elegantly curved orange beaks don’t seem to mind him. They scurry about his feet this way and that, searching for things in the sand.

And each day the ache subsides, and it’s all right, really. It was more than he had ever expected to have, after all. He’s not afraid, anymore, that he might forget. He knows now he’ll always remember. Wherever he is in the world, he can close his eyes and imagine he is right back there, in a time when he belonged somewhere. And he must have known always that it would end. Morse always drove everyone away. And Endeavour loses everything.

And he’s lost the money Turner had given him, but that’s all right.

He doesn’t need anything much, really. He has everything he needs.

He still has the wad of francs, wadded up in a zipped pouch of his satchel. . . But he doesn’t want to exchange those. He’s saving those. Just in case. It may be for the best, accepting things as they are, but that doesn’t mean the road won’t divide and divide again, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a world out there in which the man writes back.

 

In Ullapool, bright flags blow out over the water. The wind is turning colder. Endeavour doesn’t know what day it is; now that he’s fulfilled his obligation to Turner and sent Esme her letter for the Sorbonne, time doesn’t seem to matter much. And, anyway, time moves at a different pace than it did before all that.

Maybe hanging out suits for the man helped him as much as it helped the man to sort time. Endeavour: Today is Tuesday. Bixby: Life is too short to spend three hours quibbling over a tie. It doesn’t matter, anymore, anyway, all of this show, all of this pretense.  Everyone else has forgotten. Time has flowed along, and people have gotten caught up in it, and turned about in their own currents, and everyone has forgotten how you popped up one day out of nowhere, everyone else believes in you by now.

I’m the only one who still realizes it all can’t be so.

It’s all flipped, it’s all backwards from how it once was.

Everyone else believes you are real.

I’m the only one left who doesn’t.

But I tried to.

But I wanted to.

 

He still writes postcards. He’s just stopped bothering to date anything he sends. If he could, he would only be able to say: it’s turning colder and the days are shorter— but that’s too melancholy a thing to write, because it _is_ turning colder, the universe is tuning colder all of the time, as it expands and loses energy . . . and—and then Endeavour is laughing— because, as it expands, it even manages to turn the Plough into . . . into . . . the Big Dipper. And he sits on the sand and he’s laughing.

One day he begins to wonder: Is the man even still in Lorraine? Perhaps he has moved on, perhaps Endeavour is sending messages out into nothingness, perhaps his postcards are like those moons of Saturn, who once revolved on their solemn paths unseen, perhaps they are just like starlight that shoots out across the universe and never shines upon a world.

It couldn’t hurt to check.  _Are you home?_ he writes. _Love, E._

But the man must have moved on, either literally or figuratively, because there is no answer.

 

He stays in Ullapool for longer than he intended. Just to make sure. It can’t hurt. It’s not as if he has anywhere else to go. Each day, he checks the post.

And then one day, there’s a postcard. And he can barely breathe.

He packs his things, but it doesn’t take long. He doesn’t have very much, really. He’s glad he saved the francs. The hardest part will be getting through the airport, but it needn’t be too difficult. He just won’t let the lights distract him this time. It’s like looking at the stars; you can be overwhelmed by the scatter of broken diamonds or concentrate on only one.

 

And he’s Endeavour and he’s walking amongst grass and tall dying purple flowers that ripple like seas, and he’s walking south, and the birds are, too; they fly in scatters of flash and feather above.

“Do you have everything you need?” the man had asked.

 

And, surprisingly, it turns out, he did. He always has.

It was the man with the polished and practiced smile who didn’t.

And that’s why Endeavour is walking south, as birds fly in flocks like arrows above him.  

 


End file.
